A Beautiful Distraction(99)

“Fallon—”

“Can you for one second—just one second—think about what it was like for me? While you were off playing soldier, I was living in a women’s home, growing your child inside my body. I had no one but myself. No home, no family, no money. Everything I’d ever known, ever had, was taken from me and I was left with nothing.” She was seeing red. Her heart was beating so fast that her body shook as it slammed against her chest.

“Well, from what I understand, you’re doing pretty well for yourself.”

Sighing, she shook her head and turned away from him. She was done. She had nothing more to say other than a few choice words that would most definitely make a scene, and although she loved to claim a room, at that moment she just wanted to disappear.

“Wait a minute,” he barked, grabbing her around her wrist as she bolted for the door. He spun her around to face him and she sliced her eyes at him.

“What?” she said with all the hatred she had buried inside her.

“You can at least tell me what you had. Tell me what you did. Did you keep it?”

A bloodcurdling scream formed and swelled at the base of her throat, burning with the need to escape. “You fucking asshole!” she seethed. “You have no right—no right—to ask me about her.” Tears formed in her eyes, blurring her vision as she willed them away, silently begging them not to fall.

“Her? You had a little girl?” he asked, and the genuine curiosity in his tone sucked what little air she had left from her lungs. She couldn’t breathe.

“Fuck you,” she whispered, because if she would have released the scream that would have soothed her anger, the tears would’ve fallen. She would not let him see her cry. Jerking her arm, she tried to pull from his grasp. She needed to get out of there, she needed to get away from him.

“Let go, Curt.”

“I want to know, Fallon,” he said, tightening his grip on her wrist. “I have a right to know if you kept her, if you kept my daughter.”

“You have no fucking right!”

She didn’t think; she just reacted. Her palm lurched up and made contact with his face in a sharp slap that echoed through the room.

“Now let me go!”

She thought she’d said the words aloud, but she couldn’t be sure. Because at that same moment, Rafe’s fist barreled in the space between their bodies and rammed into Curt’s jaw with the uneasy sound of bone meeting bone.

She waited for him to lose it, for his rage to consume him, for him to charge back into the fight.

But it was just the one blow. The one hit. And it knocked Curt to the ground.

His hands plowed through her hair, grabbing her firmly behind her head as he brought his inked eyes to her. “You okay?” His voice, his touch, his eyes brought her back—slowing the anger, the hurt that was gnawing at her insides.

“I’m fine.”

“That’s him, isn’t it?” he asked, piecing it together.

“Yeah.”

“You realize you just publicly assaulted your commanding officer,” Curt bellowed as he shuffled to his feet.

Rafe’s body straightened and his hands left her and in the same fluid movement he was in front of Curt again. Baring his teeth, he lowered his voice, threatening. “And I’d fucking do it all over again,” he snarled.

Curt laughed, his smile menacing, looking around the room as if beckoning an audience to witness his authority. Always looking for the rise. “I’ll have your rank, First Sergeant. You can guarantee it.”

“Take it,” he urged. His body moved infinitesimally closer to Curt so their chests were touching. Balling his hands into fists, he leveled his threatening eyes. “You think my diamond is more fuckin’ important to me?”

Stepping back, Rafe reached into his pocket and pulled out a knife. Raising it to his bicep, he took the corner of a patch that was sewn onto the shoulder of his jacket and cut away the diamond that rested at the center.

He cut away his rank.

“It’s not,” he said, throwing the ragged scrap of patch at Curt’s feet. “She is. Take my fuckin’ rank, sir,” he said mockingly. “I’m taking her.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX


The desperation in her kiss was simply impossible to absorb. But he tried. He tried like hell to take it all from her.

Her fingernails dug into his scalp as he lowered onto the bed above her, her smooth, naked body contouring to every hard muscle of his.

She fucking fit.

His cock eased into her slick pussy and she instantly tightened around him. He sighed from the pure relief he felt sinking into her. She claimed him. Every fucking part of him. She had the power to destroy him, and he didn’t care.